Bertrand Lafont,
CNRS
Presented to the CDLI Avalon Meeting, October 2001
A review is offered in the following of the collections of the Louvre and the Istanbul Museum, and what seems possible to do in each of these two museums in the scope of the CDLI project.
From a quantitative point of view, this museum is not among the richest in numbers of cuneiform tablets of the 4th and 3rd millennia. There are only some samples of archaic texts from the Uruk and Jemdet Nasr periods, and some texts from ED IIIa/Fara. Naturally, we find in the Louvre larger collections of Tello and Susa tablets due to the history of research and excavations in the past 150 years.
Actually, for the IIIrd millennium, most of the available material is made up of tablets of the Ur III period, deriving mainly from Tello/Girsu, Drehem/Puzrish-Dagan and Djokha/Umma.
Most of these cuneiform texts have been published, and we can quickly note the main bibliography about their publication:
* For the Tello tablets: Allotte de la Fuye, DP; Thureau-Dangin RTC, and my DAS.
* For the Susa tablets: Scheil MDP 2, 6, 17, 26.
* For the Drehem tablets, Genouillac TCL 2.
* For the Umma tablets: Genouillac TCL 5.
* For several series of Ur III tablets: Gregoire AAS.
But it is certain that small parts of the IIIrd millennium tablet collection in the Louvre are still unpublished, and it will be necessary to check this point in the course of the project.
What are the consequences of this situation for the CDLI project? Contact already exists, of course, between the CDLI staff and Beatrice Andre-Salvini, curator of the cuneiform tablets in the Louvre. She has made the following clear:
1) The Louvre agrees with the aim and methods of, and will participate with the CDLI project on a basis similar to that followed by the VAM in Berlin, the BM in London, and the Hermitage in St-Petersburg.
2) At present, the Museum is unfortunately still in the process of reorganization. For one more year at least, access to tablets will be difficult: both premises and availability of the necessary technical staff will be restricted. We need working space, time, and staff to participate effectively in the goals of the CDLI.
3) Arrangements must be made for the coordination of CDLI work with the Louvre's "computer and networking services", the "photography service" and with the administrative authorities of the Museum.
4)İThe Louvre Museum authorities wish that photos and images be made by the Museum's own staff, or at least in close association with them.
5) It has been noticed, moreover, that, at present, photographers of the Louvre seem to obtain better image resolution than is evident in the pages of the CDLI, for example, in the pages of the VAM. We wonder whether it would not it be better to digitize first the paper-edited photos already produced by the Museum with traditional methods?
6) The Museum retains the use and copyright of digital images work for its own web site. It will be necessary to create direct web links between the CDLI and Louvre online services.
Of course, beyond the digitization of the tablets, scientific work has also to be accomplished, for instance in cataloguing, transliterating, collating and marking up all the texts according to the standards of the CDLI project. This is the work that I will coordinate in Paris, and with CDLI staff. Jacob Dahl has now planned a working visit to the Louvre for the months of May and June of 2002, during which time he expects to work on the proto-Elamite and the Umma collections.
The Istanbul Archaeological Museum is quantitatively much richer than the Louvre in cuneiform tablets dating to the IIIrd millennium.
The beginnings of the cuneiform tablets collection in Istanbul go back to the creation of the Ottoman Imperial Museum and to the implementation of the Turkish Law on Antiquities of 1883, which claimed for this Museum all the antiquities discovered on the territory of the Ottoman Empire.
The first cuneiform tablets that reached the Museum, by 1890, were those found during the first campaigns led in Niffer/Nippur. Massive numbers of new tablets followed in the next years, from the Iraqi sites of Tello/Girsu, Abu Habba/Sippar, Fara/Shuruppak, Bismaya/Adab, Warka/Uruk, Kish and Qalat Shergat/Assur. At the same time (that is before the First World War), Ottoman authorities seized and forwarded to the Istanbul Museum a lot of illicitly excavated tablets coming from the sites of Tello/Girsu, Djokha/Umma and Drehem/Puzrish-Dagan. It is noteworthy that, since the end of the First World War and the subsequent creation of the Republic of Turkey, these tablet collections in Istanbul not increased in size.
First attempts to classify the tablets took place before 1920: Hilprecht worked on the Nippur tablets; Scheil on the Sippar tablets; Virolleaud, Thureau-Dangin, Genouillac and Delaporte on the huge collection of the Tello tablets; and Genouillac on the Kish tablets. But it is only with the arrival of Fritz Kraus in Istanbul in 1937 that a real inventory and classification work could begin in the museum collections. Kraus dedicated ten years of his life to this job, before going to Leiden. He stayed in Istanbul at the same time that Landsberger was teaching in Ankara.
After him were two generations of Turkish
curators: Muazzez Çig
and Hatice
Kizilyay until the 60's, then Veysel Donbaz and Fatma Yildiz until the present time.
On the whole, according to Kraus himself, the number of cuneiform tablets in the Istanbul collection, deriving from 12 different sites, comprises ca. 75,000 exemplars. Of that number, 40,000 tablets and fragments come from the single site of Tello. But we must admit that most of these Tello tablets are today in a fragmentary state, some indeed very small. The reason for this is that theses documents, notably the great number of Tello's large, multiple-column tablets, seem to have suffered substantially from the attempts of conservators in the 1930s to preserve them through baking.
The classification of these cuneiform texts was made, first of all, according to their provenience, and then by distinguishing among them economic, administrative and juridical tablets, letters, literary texts, and school tablets.
Third millennium cuneiform tablets in the collections may be categorized in the following manner:
Tello tablets (Museum signature: L): as stated above, there are more than 40,000 tablets and fragments. For the inventory numbers of tablets numbered from 1 to 10,000, the reference work is the ITT catalogue (Inventaire des Tablettes de Tello) published between 1910 and 1921. To be added to it are: Thureau-Dangin RTC, Lambert TEL, Pettinato MVN VI and VII, Lafont-Yildiz TCTI 1 & 2. For the inventory numbers between 10,000 to 40,000, the only available tool, at present, is a handwritten catalog in Turkish. And, again, the state of preservation of this part of the collection is very fragmentary.
Nippur tablets (Museum signature: Ni): of the 17,000 tablets from this site, 1,200 date to the 3rd millennium; but only 320 of them have been published by Çig and Kizilyay, NRVN 1 in 1965. T. Ozaki has also worked on this material and will presumably publish some more tablets.
Drehem tablets (Museum signature: P): all of the 1,400 Drehem tablets of the Istanbul collection have been published in two volumes: Çig, Kizilyay and Salonen PDT 1, and Yildiz-Gomi PDT 2.
Umma tablets (Museum signature: U): 4,000 tablets from Umma are now completely published in six volumes by Waetzoldt and Yildiz, MVN 14 and 16, and by Ozaki/Gomi and Yildiz, UTI 3 , 4 , 5 and 6).
Shuruppak tablets (Museum signature: Shin): 1,000 tablets and fragments come from this site. The two volumes by Jestin, TSS and NTSS, made some of these tablets known in 1937 and 1957. A project headed by H. Steible and F. Yildiz will reassess this part of the collection. They are currently preparing a complete publication / republication of these texts.
Adab tablets (Museum signature: Ad): Among the 1,100 tablets and fragments from this site, about 600 texts date to the Old Akkadian period; they have been little studied until now.
Generally, except for the Tello collection, a large part of the 3rd millennium cuneiform tablets kept in Istanbul have been published. Of these texts, those from Umma and Drehem are now completely published, and the work on the Shuruppak corpus is in the process of being completion. There are nevertheless still some beautiful fragments that have to be catalogued, studied and edited.
F. Yildiz and I are now editing the Tello material; with publication of our volume TCTI 3, all the tablets from 1 to 10,000 will be available. Texts from 10,000 to 40.000 (that is, 3/4 of the collection) remain, but given the very fragmentary character of this part of the collection, it would be doubtless preferable to edit a computerized catalog, similar to that published by Marcel Sigrist for the tablets of Yale and of the BM. We need to discuss with the Turkish authorities, both in the Istanbul Museum and in Ankara, a cooperative task within the framework of the CDLI Project that would permit us to digitize all the published tablets for immediate online presentation, while at the same time scanning all unpublished material for joint presentation within the publication plans of the museums.